How to Break a Spell

I grew up in New York City in the seventies and eighties, back when latchkey kids were common, and Fred Rogers did the parenting. My own parents split when I was four, and my mom and I stayed in the apartment that had been all of ours on West 85th, while my dad moved to an apartment nearby on West 76th Street. My elementary school was (and remains) on 95th just off Central Park West. I was an Upper West Side kid all the way. Starting in third grade I was packing my own lunch for school and either taking the public bus or walking. My dad could usually pick me up from school if it was a “dad day” but eventually my mom and stepdad opened a French restaurant on the East Side and my mom was there until evening. On “mom days” if I wasn’t taking a radio-call cab across town to see her, doing my homework at the bar with my legs dangling while the bartender cut lemons and limes, I’d walk home.

One day when I was nine, as I was heading to my mom’s after school, I walked by the courtyard of a building and heard a commotion. There were about twelve kids huddled around something I couldn’t see yelling, “Get it, get it!” There was a tall kid in the middle holding a broomstick “stabbing” the stick down at whatever was below him. My curiosity got the better of my fear of a group of kids I didn’t know, and I walked over to see what was at the center of all this excitement. 

I got close enough to make out a large white utility bucket. Some of the kids made space for me as I crept a little closer to get a peek at what was inside. I peered over the lip and saw a tiny mouse covered in some kind of white powder, scrambling in circles at the bottom of the bucket. Somehow I could see its heart beating in its whole little body. Its eyes were wild, and it was shaking. “Hey! Stop that, what’re you doing??” someone yelled, and everyone froze and stared at me. I realized I had yelled, but I was emboldened by something I couldn’t have named. I was the kid whose voice shook when called on to read in class. Yelling at kids who were strangers to me was not something I ever would have imagined myself doing, but the words were already outside my body, hanging in the air. The tall kid looked at me, hesitating. “I’m trying to kill it,” he said, shrugging like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Why?” I asked, and to my horror I could feel tears pooling, threatening to spill down my face. He stared at me for a minute. He was a good foot taller than I was, and probably about fourteen. Everyone had gotten really quiet. “I don’t know,” he said, “do you want it?” I nodded. Some of the kids looked from him to me and scuttled away, toward the building, the rest looked sheepish. The tall kid bent down and handed me the bucket. I had to use both arms to carry it, not because it was heavy, but because it was wide. I was too scared of the mouse to pick it up any other way. There was a sharp smell coming from the bucket that was familiar, but out of place. “What is that powder all over it?” I asked him. “It’s bleach,” he said, and I nodded, like that made sense. 

I walked the rest of the way to my mom’s talking to the mouse. I decided it was a she for no reason at all, and I told her she was okay now, I was going to figure out how to clean her and set her free in the park. I knew there wasn’t any way my mom would let me keep a mouse, the same way she wouldn’t let me keep the sparrow that fell from the sky when I was sitting in the window-seat in our living room one day. I’d run down to the street with an empty shoebox I’d stuffed with a soft rag, and our neighbor Larry from across the street had helped me gently lift it off the sidewalk and put the bird inside. Its wing was broken. My mom was okay with me nursing it back to health, but that was it, once it was well I had to let it go. I knew it would be the same with the mouse. 

It turned out my mom was less thrilled about the mouse than she had been about the sparrow, but I think by then she realized this was going to be a thing I did. I was a collector of anything in trouble. I couldn’t figure out how to get the bleach off the mouse without water, and I felt pretty sure adding water would make things worse. In the end, I took the mouse to our neighborhood veterinarian and they managed to clean it. I set the mouse free in Riverside Park, and that was the last time we spoke. This isn’t really a story about the mouse, though.

Photo by Ricky Kharawala on Unsplash

I’m not sure what it was that made me walk over to that group of kids, or why the tall one stopped what he was doing, but my guess is when I asked him why he wanted to kill it and looked at him with such sadness and confusion, it made him wonder the same thing. It was almost as though the whole group of kids had been under a spell, carried along by the chants of “Get it!” knowing the mouse had little hope and this might be one place where they could feel some power. That’s possibly the same thing that made me yell, the idea that maybe I couldn’t save myself, but I might be able to save the mouse. 

I tried to save people, too, not just mice and sparrows. My dad was the first person I tried to save, and he was all-too-willing to let me try. If you’re a narcissist, what could be better than banging every woman in sight and having your little girl think you’re a wonderful guy? I didn’t know the call was coming from inside the house, that sometimes a person creates his own demon and then pretends to be its victim as a way to excuse burning through all the women who cross his path. It's not me, it’s my uncontrollable need to be free. Whatever, dude. I couldn’t save him because he didn’t want to be saved, he wanted to do what he wanted to do without any consequence.

Then I tried to save my mom from her alcoholism, but I was no match for that, either: 

Chardonnay - 15,330

Me - 0

You’d think I might have gotten the memo then, before I headed out into the world, but nothing drew me in like someone who was hurting. I felt sure most people just needed love, and maybe someone to ask them why they were being so awful to themselves, as if they had a broomstick and were torturing their own inner mouse. Maybe if I asked why, they’d stop and ask themselves why, and the spell would be broken. But no matter how hard I tried or how much I thought I was going to save the day, the same thing happened over and over again. There was no happy ending. There was just heartache and heartbreak and loss. 

Sometimes you know something in your head, and you know it clearly: You can’t save anyone but yourself, and even that is hard. But you might know that and also be susceptible to your own addiction, and maybe you’re addicted to trying even if you know it’s futile. Or the dynamic reminds you of home and you get sucked in because it feels cozy and familiar, even if home wasn’t a safe place at all. Or maybe you’d rather distract yourself from your own work and your own healing by acting like a project manager for someone else’s. If a person is ready to be loved, hell yes you can come along and love them right up, and it will feel like magic for a while if they love you back. It’s possible the thing you grow together will have legs and it will last, and maybe not. But if someone doesn’t recognize that it’s amazing they’re here, that just waking up above ground on a spinning planet is a huge, outrageous thing, that the fact of their existence is miraculous whether the miracle is scientific or otherwise, that they have something to offer that is particular to them and worth cultivating – then nothing you do is going to fix that. And eventually they’re going to wonder what’s wrong with your vision if you think they’re something special. And then things are going to get ugly, because the easiest person to lash out at is the one who’s closest. When you can’t stand yourself, you have no respect for anyone who thinks you’re incredible.

I wish saving people were as easy as saving that mouse. I wish it were as easy as yelling, Hey, stop! What are you doing?? But I also know that the struggle is part of the way out. A lot of the time it isn’t some giant standing above you with a broomstick, trying to kill you for no reason at all, though sometimes life can feel that way, and sometimes people are unthinkably cruel to one another, and to themselves. The truth is, there are chapters that feel like we’re at the bottom of a bucket, and no matter how fast we run in circles or how hard we try to scramble up the wall, there’s just no footing. If someone doesn’t happen to wander by and lend a hand, or take your entire world into their arms and tell you it’s going to be okay, maybe it isn’t. We really do need each other. So while you can’t save other people, you might be the reason a person makes it just one more day, and then one more after that. Kindness matters. It isn’t going to get the whole job done, but it counts for a lot. If a person is dealing with inner demons, though, that’s an inside job. You can yell over the lip of the bucket, you can tell them they’re incredible and you love them and and you’re waiting right there with your arms open, but the only person who can decide if they’re going to keep trying is them. A lot of the monsters that get in the way are our own thoughts, ideas and stories we have to overcome if we’re going to find some peace in this world. And you might have noticed, you can’t change anyone else’s thoughts or ideas, but you can definitely exhaust yourself trying. Some spells can only be broken from inside the bucket.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about the difference between loving people and trying to save them, I’ll be here 3/15/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. If you’d like to meet me in Portugal in June it is going to be magical, and I would love that so much.